Monday, 2 February 2015

[I recently had the high honour of being
referenced as a source on Dennis Cooper’s blog. OK he didn't mention me by
name, but Cooper recently devoted a blog entry to uncompromising French filmmaker Philippe Garrel and the paragraph on Garrel’s ultra-obscure / rarely-seen 1979 film
Le bleu des origines was lifted from my IMDb review. I saw the film at The
British Film Institute in 2007. It prompted me to post it here in its entirety
and make it look prettier than it does on IMDb.]Le bleu des origines is an
uncompromising example of old school avant-garde cinema at its most cryptic,
enigmatic and inscrutable. Made by Philippe Garrel in 1979 using a hand-cranked
silent camera, bleu represents absolute year zero in film-making, a return
to the starkest basics of film's origins in early silent cinema, replacing any
trace of narrative or even dialogue with an emphasis almost exclusively on
close-ups of women's faces. The film is black and white and absolutely silent
for its near 50-minute duration.

The total silence feels oppressive: silent
cinema, after all, was accompanied by music. The silence, though, serves to
ensure the focus on the actresses' faces is absolute, with no distraction.

The faces in question belong to the former Velvet
Underground German chanteuse, Warhol Superstar and cult figure Nico, and
bohemian French starlet Zouzou. By 1979 Nico had been Garrel's lover, muse and
collaborator for a decade. Le bleu des origines was the seventh and last film
they made together and marked the end of their off-screen relationship as well.

The film's tone is intimate but mysterious and
ultimately despairing. It is essentially a portrait of two women, Nico and
Zouzou, who are offered up for endless existential contemplation. There is no
hint of even the most basic narrative but it is human nature to try to
construct one, to try to thread together scenes, which are alternately jagged
and brief, and sometimes-long Warholian takes that frankly court boredom.

Garrel offers hints of symbolism that are
probably highly significant but remain opaque: Nico examining a jewel in her
hand; many shots of both women reading manuscripts or poetry by candlelight; a
glimpse of Nico's passport; Nico pointing at the sky; Zouzou writing; Nico
folding a letter and putting it in an envelope; Zouzou wielding a knife; Nico
as an angel of death with waist-length hair in a billowing black cape, filmed
in high winter on the roof of the Paris Opera House among the stone gargoyles. Most
strikingly, Nico in some kind of dungeon or prison slowly climbing a stone
staircase, pausing on each step, in jerky zombie-like movements straight out of
a lost German Expressionist masterpiece.

/ Consider this a trailer for Le bleu des origines: eerie dirge "We've Got the Gold" from Nico's 1974 album The End providing a soundtrack to clips from Le bleu des origines /

Nico and Zouzou are mostly filmed alone but
sometimes together. What links them? Both women were frequent collaborators
with Garrel and had appeared in his films several times separately before. Nico
was romantically linked with Garrel: I’m uncertain whether Zouzou was. Like
Anita Pallenberg, both women had been involved with the doomed Rolling Stone
Brian Jones. In the 1960s both Nico and Zouzou had been glamorous art-y girls
of the moment, fashion models turned singers and actresses. By 1979 both women
had hit hard times. Nico, Zouzou and Garrel are all known for their heroin
addiction. (Later in her life Zouzou did jail time and was reduced to selling
the Parisian equivalent of The Big Issue outside Paris metro stations).

Again and again Garrel films them in scenes that
emphasise their alienation, anguish, distress, isolation, solitude. Both Nico
and Zouzou were great beauties and there is genuine pleasure in lengthily
scrutinising them in long silent takes; from shot to shot, though, depending on
how the light hits their faces, both can look suddenly, startlingly ravaged,
older than their years. Maybe the film is about the hell of heroin addiction?

There is actually a third woman in the film who
appears so briefly she is almost subliminal: Jean Seberg. (Seberg and Nico had already appeared together in the earlier Garrel film Les hautes solitudes in 1974). In some shots a
barely glimpsed heavy-set but still beautiful older woman appears, standing
behind Nico while Nico plays the piano like the phantom of the opera. Later,
and shockingly, Seberg inexplicably slaps Nico hard across the face. Seberg
committed suicide in 1979, the year this film was released. This surely
represents her last-ever film appearance.

While Zouzou gets equal screen time and is
certainly charismatic, it must be said the film belongs to Nico. In her
haunting close-ups she suggests the post-punk Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich
of underground art cinema. Even in the “talkies” of the 1930s some of Garbo and
Dietrich's most mesmerising on-screen moments were silent close-ups of their
faces (i.e. the concluding scenes of Queen Christina and Morocco). Their allure
was non-verbal, not dependent on dialogue or voices – they cast a spell with
just their eyes. In Le bleu des origines Nico does the same.

/ The famous concluding close-up of Queen
Christina (1933) in which the serenely impenetrable Greta Garbo stares into the
horizon, her inner world sealed off to us. I’d argue this anticipates the
lengthy, unfathomable close-ups Andy Warhol and then Garrel would devote to
Nico in their underground art films /

As the film continues, the mood of distress and
impending tragedy grows more overt. Towards the end Nico is shown wrapped in a
headscarf, crying genuine inconsolable tears, her breath visible in frosty
night air, seemingly not acting. Her depression is tangible. For someone frequently
lazily described as an ice queen who sang in a bored monotone, Nico here
convincingly projects raw emotion: her presence aches with a heavy sadness.

Sometimes hypnotic, sometimes catatonic, Le bleu
des origines is as bleakly beautiful as Nico's best music and was obviously a heartfelt
personal and artistic statement. If the film does represent the end of their
relationship, it is certainly a last cinematic love letter from Garrel to Nico.

/ Portrait of Nico circa her 1981 album Drama of Exile /

/ You can watch Le bleu des origines in its entirety on the Youtube link above. How lucky I was to see it in an exquisite sparkling print at The British Film Institute: this is clearly a bootleg (I think someone filmed it sitting in a cinema!) but Garrel has never released it on DVD and for now this represents your best viewing source. For a soundtrack to this silent film I suggest you load your CD player with Nico's essential trilogy (her "gravest hits" if you like) - The Marble Index (1969), Desertshore (1970) and The End (1974) - and crank it up loud /